Galveston County voting extended by two hours

Updated 2:24 pm, Tuesday, November 6, 2012

A Galveston County judge has ordered that polls remain open one hour and 54 minutes after the normal closing time because of problems with voting machines, the Galveston County Clerk's Office said.

District Judge John Ellisor ordered that polling places remain open until 8:54 p.m. at the request of officials from the Democratic and Republican parties, said Neil Baron, attorney for the Democrats.

The order said that all votes cast after 7 p.m. would be cast as provisional ballots.

The polls opened at 7 a.m., but the voting machines at all 45 polling places took longer than expected to complete a process known as "zeroing out" whereby the machine verifies that no votes are recorded before voting starts, County Clerk Dwight Sullivan said.

Marcey Casey, president of the Galveston County Democratic Club, said voters called her to complain that they were unable to vote when the polls opened in La Marque. At least 100 people waited in line at La Marque where an estimated 100 voters waited in line.

Sullivan said that in previous elections the machines took only a few minutes to zero out, but it may have taken longer this time because this is the largest election in which the countywide vote center method has been used since the county first used the method in 2009.

The countywide vote center allows voting at any polling place in the county. The method was abandoned for the 2010 election after encountering problems connecting to the Internet in 2009. It was revived in 2011 with few problems, but has never been used in a presidential election by Galveston County.

The Galveston City elections in May, run by the county under contract, were also beset by problems.